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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24646798">the other side of mercy</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazyache/pseuds/crazyache'>crazyache</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Slow Burn, Zuko POV, mostly canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 02:46:14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,094</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24646798</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazyache/pseuds/crazyache</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He once wished for high-strung and crazy. Zuko learns what Katara is and isn't.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Katara/Zuko (Avatar)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>224</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the other side of mercy</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Hey, don’t worry about my sister,” Sokka breathed between strikes of metal and meteor during their sword practice. “Katara’s just high-strung and crazy. She’ll cool off eventually.”</p><p>Zuko, usually deliberate in his footwork, caught himself up on the warrior’s words. Just enough of an opening for Sokka to trip the firebender with his weapon and laugh at his fate.</p><p>“W-What did you just call her?” he looked up to see an arm extended to help him up.</p><p>“High-strung and crazy. I heard about the death threats, ending-your-destiny-permanently, always-watching-you-with-an-evil-eye kind of thing. It’ll pass.”</p><p><em>I wish you would be high-strung and crazy for once instead of keeping all your feelings bottled up inside.</em> Even as he was lifted to his feet, his head was still on Ember Island, spinning around the fire on the beach, Mai’s solemn face in his line of sight. Back on his feet, standing at the Western Air Temple, he rubbed the back of his head, and blinked the memory of what he had once said away.</p><p>*</p><p>“Oh, everyone trusts you now! I was the first person to trust you!”</p><p>Zuko’s eyes follow the hand that lands above her heart, studying her fury closely. Even with the full moon as her backdrop, Katara’s anger and pain engulfed the entire night sky. Somehow, she eclipsed it all. <em>You rise with the moon</em>, he thought briefly, as she reached new heights of emotion.</p><p>“Remember, back in Ba Sing Se.” Her delivery felt like icicles in his chest. The ocean crashed against the cliffside near him, and it echoed like the one she drowned him in the catacombs to catch the Avatar from falling, from Azula’s lightning.</p><p>“And you turned around and betrayed me, betrayed all of us!”</p><p>When he closes his eyes and asks, “What can I do to make it up to you?” he’s not sure why he was so adamant for her forgiveness. Especially when she was so adamantly against him. But if he really thought about it, looked closely at the way her shouldering past him left him wounded, he may have seen it more clearly.</p><p>For so much of his life, the people in his life had been cold and distant in their scorn; detached in all the ways they hurt and marked him. But this waterbender’s storm was anything but cold. He could recognize fire inside her threats and venom, and Zuko, if anything, was desperate to be warm.</p><p>*</p><p>When they leave Yon Rha behind, he is angry too, not at the way she let the rain splatter on the ground, her mercy echoing like little drums against the mud, rather, angry at this man for being the one to make her crumble.</p><p>As they approach Appa, Zuko is quick to notice the way her knees buckle beneath her, tenderness and despair seemingly dragging her down with all its might. He is quicker. With a swift motion, he catches her with a hand under her knees and the other at her shoulders. For the very first time since they have crossed paths, she does not fight him. She yields to his touch.</p><p>He carries her to the saddle, gentle in the way he leaves her to rest. Before he has a chance to jump to the front of the bison, she stops him. “Why?” she blinks at him, “Why did you help me find him?”</p><p>The rain has plastered their hair and soaked into their clothes. Her natural element hides the tears staining her cheeks.</p><p>“Because,” he knelt next to her, “It’s important to face our monsters. To know they’re real and not just in our head. Whether or not we beat them...to know we are stronger than them...well, sometimes it’s enough.”</p><p>He’s not sure how, but it feels like her intense blue eyes are able to see inside his head, just enough to see his father’s face, the crack of lightning, the burnt spot next to him. She holds his stare, and for a moment he can’t breathe, remembering the restraint he possessed that day, noticing how much it matched hers today, and he swears there’s recognition in that face of hers as well. Zuko is back in the rain when Katara asks, “Enough for what?”</p><p>“Enough to not be haunted anymore,” he aches to touch her, to wipe a stray hair, to lay a hand on her shoulder, but instead he curls them into fists and stands to take them back home.</p><p>*</p><p>The rain cleared and he could see a sunset begin to peak into the distance. Zuko is startled when he feels a body climb next to him at the front of the flying bison.</p><p>“Did you face your monster?” She is quiet, tired and frayed along all her edges. She is subdued in ways that are unfamiliar from the waterbender he usually encounters.</p><p>“My father,” he answers. She is staring at the side with his scar. “Right before I joined you all.”</p><p>“You couldn’t do it either,” she remarks hesitantly. If he was brave enough, he would have glanced at her, instead of staring straight ahead, unmoved. Afraid to be burned. If he had looked, he would have seen her face, brows knitted together, attempting to piece him together.</p><p>*</p><p>When they land elsewhere from their friends and campsite, she makes no effort in questioning him. “This is Ember Island,” he leads her inside the house, unsure if she is even listening, “It used to be our family summer home. Back when we were happy.”</p><p>Zuko turned around to find Katara standing in front of a portrait of his mother. “That’s something else we have in common,” he commented over her shoulder, “She sacrificed everything for my life.” She blinked, directing her gaze to his face. “It hurts more, doesn’t it?” Zuko sighed, ripping himself away from the painting on the wall.</p><p>“I thought you may want to be alone while I go pick up the others.”</p><p>As he leaves her in his childhood home, he thinks he hears a faint <em>thank you</em> from behind, and it sounds like water wiping footprints in the sand anew.</p><p>*</p><p>
  <em>But I am ready to forgive you.</em>
</p><p>He melts into her embrace and releases a breath, finally. She has had him on edge since the beginning. Now Zuko is on the other side of her mercy, and yet, he can’t help but feel as if it’s more dangerous over here.</p><p>*</p><p>On this side, Katara is generous in her touch. As she passes him, in their sparring and healing sessions, here in the dim Ember Island theatre, where she squeezes his hand when his actor perishes in flames on stage. He is not all unfamiliar to the language of touch--just to the kind that doesn’t pull him deep into his past, the kind that unequivocally places him in the very present, a reminder that he is still here.</p><p>*</p><p>“Where are you going?”</p><p>Zuko pulled his hood over his head, cutting Sokka, Toph, and Aang from his view. “To the market with Katara.” The swords clanked against his back.</p><p>He wasn’t sure what was so funny when they all laughed. “Be careful!” Sokka chuckled, “Don’t let her out of your sight or she’ll start a revolution when you’re not looking.”</p><p>Aang joined, waving his arms in the air like an octosnake. “Or she’ll get all Painted Lady on you!”</p><p>“And once Sugar Queen makes up her mind, good luck.” Toph spit on the ground for emphasis, leaving Zuko incredibly confused.</p><p>*</p><p>There was no surprise however, not when he was given several warnings, when she began unabashedly yelling at him. He’s staring at the waterbender, her words beyond lost on him, wondering why her sudden anger and fury leaves him starving--why it ignites a fuel in his belly. Katara was pacing the beach, throwing supplies over her shoulder, shouting into the sand.</p><p>Ember Island is an affluent community, reserved for the vacation homes of nobles and political players, but Katara had inevitably found the poor and the suffering in the outskirts of their kingdom. She found people in the shadows he had never known existed in his lifetime.</p><p>When she turns around, fist in the air ready to defend her long list of points as to why she needed to do this, he smiles at her.</p><p>“You’re not the only one with vigilante experience, Painted Lady.”</p><p>She smiles back and takes the black robes from his hand.</p><p>*</p><p>What was it that was said of Ember Island? <em>The beach has a special way…</em></p><p>She is the most expressive person he has ever met, so easy to read in the way she wears her emotions like armor to cover her dark skin. She is overflowing, he realizes. It leaks all over him. He has never had this luxury, not from his royal childhood or homeland. He has spent so much of his life guessing and decoding what others felt, especially about himself. There is so much said in her eyes--something bold as they steal food from homes only visited once a year by the rich, sadness in the reflection of her glowing hands on fragile bodies, and perhaps, hidden joy as they run back to camp in their haggard breaths, laughing.</p><p>Hundreds of shells crunch beneath their feet. When they arrive safely, he holds himself up by grabbing his knees and calls out to her, “Y-You’re...”</p><p>Katara throws her head back, looking up at the moon. “Crazy?”</p><p>“No. You’re not crazy. You…” he still struggled to find the right word, red filling his cheeks. His heart took shelter instead of courage. <em>You have so much love inside you and I don’t understand it.</em> “You’re not going to believe me when I tell you--I was the Blue Spirit!” He laughed again as she chased him into the water in disbelief, and from the corner of his eye, he could see the sun sharing the horizon with its counterpart.</p><p>
  <em>….of smoothing even the most ragged edges.</em>
</p><p>*</p><p>Amidst the outer crumbling walls of Ba Sing Se, it is time to rest from their journey across the world to find his uncle. Aang is still missing. The comet is arriving tomorrow. There is a tense anxiety in the camp and it comes in the form of Katara wildly pacing. “I don’t understand how he can’t be found anywhere! I’m really worried about him!” The others ignore her, which infuriates her further, hitching her breath in the cage of her ribs. “Oh for Agni’s sake, just come lay down.” Zuko points to the spot next to him on the furry bison.</p><p>When he looks at her, he can see worry twisting in her eyes deeper and deeper.</p><p>“So...do you know any tales of the stars? I learned some during my time on the ship, there’s one you may like actually--” He points to the sky and loses himself in the weaving of his words, just enough until she’s snoring softly, and he can turn over himself to lose himself to the quiet of sleep, where he dreams of her.</p><p>*</p><p>“Then he’ll forgive you. He will.”</p><p>She is so sure that Uncle will show mercy. In so many ways he could never fathom. He believes her because he knows the depths of her forgiveness, how her compassion can swallow you whole and spit you back out, it’s dark and tormented turns, the maddening warmth on the other side that rivaled the sun, and that was enough.</p><p>*</p><p>As they fly to what seems like their death, the nerves hit him as they begin to see the Capitol of his nation arrive into view. He cannot take his eyes off what he knows is the palace; it’s like the comet is chasing him to his final trial of destiny. A hand touches his own, ripping his gaze from the red of his country to the blue of Katara’s eyes. “I never thought I’d be fighting with you on this day.” The end always bids for truth. Her hand goes up to his scar, and he opens his mouth to say something, but the air has escaped him. “Zuko, you are going to be Fire Lord and that gives me hope, do you know that? You deserve to know that. Because you’re going to help change this world...and you’ve certainly changed mine.”</p><p>*</p><p>No, he’s the crazy one afterall, he decides while lightning pierces his core. He knew he was crazy the second he started running to save her, and in that moment, he decides to give in. He has been locked up for so long now. The only way out is in. When he chooses her, he is choosing to feel, to care, to surrender wholly to his heart, in all the ways he has learned from her, and has been changed by her.</p><p>*</p><p>He is emerging from half-awake, half-asleep when his eyes barely flutter open. The darkness seeps into his eyes, hanging on to his eye lashes. It is as if a tremendous weight sits on his chest, the faint echo of lightning still vibrating through his body. He is slow to realize that he is in his royal bedroom, too much pain to move just yet. Zuko hears whispers next to him, distant and unaware of his awakening, but familiar.</p><p>“I feel so many things,” he recognizes Katara’s voice, mostly for the underlying temper in her words, “Anger, guilt, resentment for what he did for <em>me</em>.” Her voice lowers, a tremble in her lips. “But also grateful. Confused. And overwhelmed.”</p><p>He wants to reach out and tell her he’d do it again, without question or doubt. He was not scared of the lightning, not when she stood there, only scared he wouldn’t be fast enough. A second voice, just as familiar, fills the room.</p><p>“It sounds like your heart and mind are at war regarding my nephew’s decision.” It is undeniably Uncle. This stirs his chest wide open. “I think it would be wise to take a moment and ask--what is your heart demanding to be felt at this moment?”</p><p>Zuko holds his breath to listen, even if it may kill him.</p><p>“My heart feels like...it’s never gonna be the same. And that terrifies me.”</p><p>When he opens his eyes, Iroh and Katara rush to his side.</p><p>*</p><p>During his bed rest, Zuko has ample time to think. Of his future legacy, his new throne, his past. And he most definitely does not spend ample time thinking about the women in his life, and the words <em>high strung</em> and <em>crazy</em> definitely do not keep crossing his mind.</p><p>*</p><p>In the palace’s garden, they walk together, slow because she is overly cautious of his recovery, and he is in no rush to finish anytime soon. They stop in front of the water, and Katara’s mind seems to go elsewhere. “Things are never going to be the same, are they?” she asks passingly.</p><p>Zuko looks at her, studies the cut of her chin, the silhouette of her unruly hair stark against the backdrop of his new imperial home. “No, it’s not,” he says.</p><p>She turns to look up at him, and he can read the sadness in her eyes, clear as the day. “You’re not high-strung and crazy,” he admits quickly, the thought appearing in his head faster than he can determine it’s a stupid idea to actually say out loud. Katara’s sad face twists into something of annoyance. “<em>Uh</em>--I said you’re <em>not</em>, please don’t hurt me!” She is ready to bend the pond onto his head but stops to listen.</p><p>“You’re caring and passionate. You help others despite the hurt inside you. I look at you and I see someone who is powerful, fierce, and frankly, kinda scary. You’re a force of nature. You’re unstoppable.”</p><p>He rubs the back of his neck. At this, she softens.</p><p>“Katara,” he steps towards her. His fingers tangle in her hair briefly, just before he pulls her into an embrace, whispering in her ear, “Please don’t let me stop you.”</p><p>*</p><p>Katara leaves for the Southern Water Tribe the next day. Her ship arrives three days earlier than planned, most likely due to the pull of her bending, and the push of someone’s words, the silent strength of someone releasing her. She is off to rebuild her nation and heal her people.</p><p>Even if it hurts, he falls in love with her then. Because she leaves. Because she wouldn’t be Katara if she didn’t.</p><p>*</p><p>He keeps all her letters, the testimonials of her progress, her inked confessions. And he learns again, as he always has. There is suffering in love and mercy. But he would do it again, just to see the way she exhaled. <em>I’m free</em>, she didn’t even have to say the words. It’s the least he could do.</p><p>*</p><p>Fire Lord Zuko finds himself formally invited to another Ember Island Players production, many months later, in honor of a revised ending to the war. It is every bit as awful and dreadful, and there is no one to grab his hand when he watches the imitative lightning consume his counterpart on the stage. The ending is hopeful and more accurate, so for this he applauds their efforts.</p><p>Zuko catches a fragment of a conversation near him as he leaves the play, his entourage of guards preventing him from seeing their faces closely. <em>Can you believe he did that for her? Why? He must have been crazy to--</em></p><p>“You have no idea,” he says sharply, the crown atop his head no longer allowing anyone to doubt he was just a costume. He must have been crazy to what? Save her? Love her? Let her go? He knew all of these, he just didn't want to hear it.</p><p>*</p><p>This place has new memories now. Good memories can still haunt, he has always known that. He thinks of Katara, standing in the hall of his home, the strength of a thousand warriors holding her up on her two feet. He smiles. The play missed so many moments, but he keeps them tight inside.</p><p>*</p><p>“You must be crazy,” a voice halts his steps in the dead of the night. He is caught in the threshold of a meager village outside the capitol. “To think the Fire Lord can get away with being a secret vigilante of the people?”</p><p>A year has passed. Zuko smiles as he turns around so he may know she is not just a shadow or a dream. “Well, I most certainly can’t do it alone.”</p><p>When he catches those blue eyes, he surrenders all over again.</p>
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